In ‘Dog Sees God,’ pathos prevails

By Milan Paurich

Ever wonder what could have happened to the ‘Peanuts’ characters later in life?

In Bert V. Royal’s “Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead,” the gang from Charles M. Schultz’s “Peanuts” comic strip have grown up to become hormone-addled teenagers.

Because of trademark infringement concerns, Royal had to tweak the original characters’ names in favor of wink-wink, nudge-nudge aliases. Thus, blockhead Charlie Brown becomes CB (Gary Shackleford), piano prodigy Schroeder has been rechristened Beethoven (Greg Mocker), tomboy Peppermint Patty is now boy-crazy Tricia (Brooke Slanina), etc.

It’s a precious, one-joke conceit that Royal somehow managed to stretch into a breezy, if longish one-act play.

The Oakland Center for the Art’s production of “Dog Sees God,” which opened Friday night, adds an intermission to help pad the running time, but it’s still revue-type material at best.

Like an old “Saturday Night Live” skit that gets by solely on the conviction of its performers, the Oakland’s “DSG” remains watchable and engaging throughout without ever quite delivering on the expected laughs.

As subversive and cutting-edge as his premise might have sounded on paper, Royal’s play is rarely laugh-out-loud funny. Interestingly, director Robert Dennick Joki (“The Santaland Diaries,” “Batboy: The Musical”) seems more interested in milking the show for pathos than humor.

As a result, you’re more likely to leave the theater crying than laughing. Of course, the suicide of a major character in the second act pretty much guarantees a weepy outcome.

The play opens with CB writing a letter to his pen pal about the death of his beloved pet beagle. Soon, CB’s friends show up to express their condolences. His kid sister (Alecia Sarkis) favors a Goth-gloomy approach to mourning; Van (Amato D’Apolito), still bemoaning the loss of his security blanket, puts a Buddhist spin on death; and germaphobic womanizer Matt (Ric Panning) assures CB that having a dead dog will help woo the babes. The fact that Matt finally decided to clean up his act (goodbye Pigpen!) might explain why he’s now such a studmuffin to the ladies.

There’s not a whole lot of plot, which is probably a good thing. Tricia and best friend Marcy (Denise Glinatsis) throw a wild party that culminates in a drunken three-way with Matt; CB visits Van’s Sister (Suzanne Shorrab) at the Daisy Hill Mental Hospital where she’s been institutionalized for setting fire to the hair of CB’s childhood crush, the Little Red-Haired Girl; and CB comes storming out of the closet after planting a kiss on the sexually conflicted Beethoven.

It’s the latter that provides the evening with its most amusing (“No offense, CB; but I don’t think you’re cool enough to be gay”) and touching moments. And we even learn the meaning of the play’s cryptic title (“A dog sees god in his master, but a cat just sees his reflection”).

Joki does a nice, fluid job of connecting Royal’s agglomeration of vignettes — they’re not really “scenes” per se — and the pace rarely slackens. Helping Joki’s cause is an immensely gifted cast of young actors who bring their potty-mouthed cartoon characters alive in surprising, even poignant ways.

I especially liked Sarkis and D’Apolito, who put such an original spin on Sally and Linus that you’ll never be able to watch “A Charlie Brown Christmas” again without thinking of them.

Also very good is Panning, who has a feral intensity that’s literally thrilling to behold. Slanina (who also served as the play’s stage manager) and Glinatsis are a hoot as the Paris-and-Nicole-like party girls. (Glinatsis’ hilarious exegesis on the history of “sporks” is alone worth the price of admission.)

Shorrab makes the most of her one scene as Van’s sister, and Shackleford and Mocker bring an almost “Brokeback Mountain” level of poignancy to CB and Beethoven’s star-crossed romance.

If “Dog Sees God” is ultimately less than the sum of its parts, that’s the fault of the playwright. But, thanks to the combined efforts of Joki and a first-rate ensemble, the parts are tasty enough to make this one of the more enjoyable local productions in recent memory.